In “A Split-Screen Tale of Two Generals” MoDo is just full of questions: Can General Petraeus prove respect for the civilians? Can General Kagan prove respect for the military? It seems to be question day at the Times, because The Moustache of Wisdom is full of them too. In “The Real Palestinian Revolution” he asks a few: Checked the Al-Quds stock index lately? What about the broader changes initiated in the West Bank under the leadership of Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian prime minister? Here’s MoDo:
As one general tried to reassure Congress that she respects the military, the other general tried to reassure Congress that the military respects civilians.
The split-screen Obama nominees for huge, daunting jobs were accompanied by family. The solicitor general and the solicitous general, politically shrewd navigators adept at climbing the career ladder, are regarded as shoo-ins for an administration where little else is going smoothly.
Over and over Tuesday, David Petraeus had to assure Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee that he supported the president’s timeline for starting to get out of Afghanistan.
“Do you agree with the president’s policy?” Senator Carl Levin asked Petraeus.
“I do,” the general replied.
Levin pressed on, needing to hear more soothing subordination subsequent to the bonfire-of-the-vanities flameout of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s Team America.
“Do you agree,” the senator asked, “that the setting of that July 2011 date to begin reductions signals urgency to Afghan leaders that they must more and more take responsibility for their country’s security, which is important for success of the mission in Afghanistan?”
“I do,” the general repeated respectfully.
Like a child with a favorite bedtime story, Senator Jack Reed wanted to hear it again. “You’re fully supportive of the president’s policy, including beginning a transition based upon the conditions on the ground in July of 2011?” Reed queried.
“Let me be very clear if I could, senator,” Petraeus tried again. “And not only did I say that I supported it, I said that I agreed with it.”
Signaling that NATO allies would be treated with more respect than they were by McChrystal in the Rolling Stone article, Petraeus pledged an “unshakeable commitment to teamwork” with the allies. The Michael Hastings profile began with the open-to-a-fault four-star general in a four-star suite in Paris, there to sell his new war strategy to the NATO allies and, as the writer astutely observed, “to keep up the fiction, in essence, that we actually have allies.”
Preening with Spartan street cred, disdaining anything too “Gucci,” like restaurants with candles, McChrystal groused about having to go to some fancy dinner with a French minister — an occasion profanely mocked as “gay” by one of the aides in his insolent retinue.
Petraeus began his testimony with an encomium to his retiring protégé. But besides the display of caustic disrespect for the president, his civilian advisers and the allies, the McChrystal profile exploded because it crystallized some wrenching questions: Does President Obama lay back too much at critical junctures, bending too much to Congress, corporations and generals? He looked good firing McChrystal, but those crisp moments need to come more often and more swiftly. With rising violence in Afghanistan, and rising doubts even among the brass and troops on the ground, is it time to drastically revise the strategy in Afghanistan? At what point does America lose moral authority by propping up a corrupt regime? As the allies pour billions in, some in Hamid Karzai’s inner circle, including his brother, may be transferring as much as a billion a year out to Dubai and elsewhere.
Obama aides were happily aware that sending the ambitious Petraeus back to work on its Gordian knot would eliminate him from consideration for the 2012 presidential race. But choosing Petraeus means reupping with a fatally flawed policy, not revamping it.
“This is a contest of wills,” Petraeus observed about the U.S.-Taliban nine-year standoff, freely admitting that we are stuck there “for quite some time.”
He conceded that “we cannot kill or capture our way out of an industrial-strength insurgency like that in Afghanistan.”
But killing and courting an enemy at the same time seems more like a contradiction than a counterinsurgency.
Across the TV screen and over at the Senate Judiciary Committee, Elena Kagan — who is supposed to be addressed as “General Kagan” — was waging her own battle to prove that she is not a radical, antimilitary pinko.
“You know, I respect — indeed, I revere — the military; my father was a veteran,” said Kagan, after Senator Jeff Sessions, a Republican of Alabama, grilled her about denying military recruiters equal access to the Harvard Law School’s office of career services because she considered the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy abhorrent and discriminatory.
When Sessions quizzed the Supreme Court nominee and former Harvard Law School dean about her treatment of “those men and women who we send in harm’s way to serve our nation,” she asserted that “the military at all times during my deanship had full and good access.”
Sessions rebutted that her remarks were “unconnected to reality,” while over at the Armed Services Committee, Petraeus did his best to make the case that our goals in Afghanistan are not unconnected to reality.
“Somebody,” said a disgusted Senator Lindsey Graham, “needs to get it straight, without a doubt, what the hell we’re going to do come July.”
If Kagan was headed toward the land of First Mondays, Petraeus was headed toward the land of “Who’s on first?”
Now here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:
Pssssst. I’ve got a stock tip. Ready? The Al-Quds Index.
What’s that? It’s the P.S.E., or Palestine Securities Exchange. Based in Nablus, in the West Bank, the Al-Quds Index has actually been having a solid year — and therein lies a tale.
“It has outperformed the stock exchanges of most Arab countries,” said Samir Hulileh, the C.E.O. of Palestine Development and Investment, which owns the exchange. The P.S.E. was established in 1996 with 19 companies and now has 41 — and 8 more will join this year. The companies listed there include the Commercial Bank of Palestine, Nablus Surgical Center, Palestine Electric Company and Arab Palestinian Shopping Centers. “Most are underpriced because of the political risk component,” said Hulileh. So if you don’t mind a little volatility, there is a lot of potential upside here. Indeed, there will soon be an E.T.F. — an exchange-traded fund — that tracks the Al-Quds Index so you can sit in America and go long or short peace in Palestine.
The expansion of the Al-Quds Index is part of a broader set of changes initiated in the West Bank in the last few years under the leadership of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, the former World Bank economist who has unleashed a real Palestinian “revolution.” It is a revolution based on building Palestinian capacity and institutions not just resisting Israeli occupation, on the theory that if the Palestinians can build a real economy, a professional security force and an effective, transparent government bureaucracy it will eventually become impossible for Israel to deny the Palestinians a state in the West Bank and Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem.
“I have to admit, we, the private sector, have changed,” said Hulileh. “The mood used to be all the time to complain and say there is nothing we can do. And then the politicians were trying to create this atmosphere of resistance — resistance meant no development under occupation.”
Fayyad and his boss, President Mahmoud Abbas, changed that. Now the mood, said Hulileh, is that improving the Palestinian economy “is what will enable you to resist and be steadfast. Fayyad said to us: ‘You, the business community, are not responsible for ending occupation. You are responsible for employing people and getting ready for the state. And that means you have to be part of the global world, to export and import, so when the state will come you will not have a garbage yard. You will be ready.’ ”
Meeting in his Ramallah office two weeks ago, I found Fayyad upbeat. The economist-turned-politician seems more comfortable mixing with his constituents in the West Bank, where he has quietly built his popularity by delivering water wells, new schools — so there are no more double shifts — and a waste-water treatment facility. The most senior Israeli military people told me the new security force that Fayyad has built is the real deal — real enough that Israel has taken down most of the checkpoints inside the West Bank. So internal commerce and investment are starting to flow, and even some Gazans are moving there. “We may not be too far from a point of inflection,” Fayyad said to me.
The Abbas-Fayyad state-building effort is still fragile, and it rests on a small team of technocrats, Palestinian business elites and a new professional security force. The stronger this team grows, the more it challenges and will be challenged by some of the old-line Fatah Palestinian cadres in the West Bank, not to mention Hamas in Gaza. It is the only hope left, though, for a two-state solution, so it needs to be quietly supported.
The most important thing President Obama can do when he meets Israel’s prime minister, Bibi Netanyahu, on July 6 is to nudge him to begin gradually ceding control of major West Bank Palestinian cities to the Palestinian Authority so that Fayyad can show his people, as he puts it, that what he is building is an independent state “not an exercise in adapting to the permanence of occupation” — and so that Israel can test if the new Palestinian security forces really can keep the peace without Israel making nighttime raids. Nothing would strengthen Fayyadism more than that.
I am struck, though, at how much Fayyadism makes some Arabs and Israelis uncomfortable. For those Arabs who have fallen in love with the idea of Palestinians as permanent victims, forever engaged in a heroic “armed struggle” to recover Palestine and Arab dignity, Fayyad’s methodical state-building is inauthentic. Some Arabs — shamefully — dump on it, and only the United Arab Emirates has offered real financial help.
And for Israelis on the right, particularly West Bank settlers, who love the notion that there are no responsible Palestinians to talk to so the status quo will never change, Fayyadism is a real threat. Akiva Eldar, a columnist for the Israeli daily Haaretz, described this group perfectly the other day when he wrote how they “won’t relinquish the Arabs’ ‘no’s. Or, as the poet Constantine Cavafy wrote in ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ … : ‘And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? / They were, those people, a kind of solution.’ ”
